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Rise of the Triad is the best game I've only played one level of.
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Apr 12, 2019 06:52
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i had my mind absolutely blown when i went to rock paper shotgun this morning and they had an article about spooky castle, a game i played heaps of on one of those share/freeware game cds but i thought id never work out the name of
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Apr 12, 2019 07:30
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Cleretic posted:I thought there was an episode of Commander Keen that was effectively lost because the shareware approach meant nobody had it, but I can't find any evidence of that. Wikipedia posted:Keen Dreams was not as widely played or noted as the other Keen games, and as it was owned by Softdisk was included in only one of the several compilation releases of the series by id or regular publisher Apogee Software; as a result, it became known as the "lost episode" of the series. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commander_Keen_in_Keen_Dreams#Legacy
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Apr 12, 2019 07:44
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FactsAreUseless posted:I spent a lot of time with these as a poor child, despite having an NES. They were neat because you never knew what the hell you were going to get, and there was a thrill in finding hidden gems in there. Do kids these days even know the joy of going to a computer swap meet, walking up to a table full of floppy disks and CDs in narrow cardboard boxes and just spending 10 minutes flipping through them until something grabbed their eye? Simpsons Doom 
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Apr 12, 2019 10:39
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Cardiovorax posted:Come to think of it, Asscreed games really haven't shown any respect to any other facet of history, so it borders on a miracle that they haven't had you meet Jesus yet. Not met, but one codex entry in AC2 mentions that Jesus was an amateur philosopher and carpenter apprentice, basically "nobody", who stumbled upon a piece of Eden -precursor artifact.
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Apr 12, 2019 10:58
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Der Kyhe posted:Not met, but one codex entry in AC2 mentions that Jesus was an amateur philosopher and carpenter apprentice, basically "nobody", who stumbled upon a piece of Eden -precursor artifact.
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Apr 12, 2019 13:53
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Cardiovorax posted:It's nice that they're at least consistent about making GBS threads on the achievements of everyone in all of history who doesn't belong one of their two Original Conspiracy Do Not Steal in some manner. drat, can't believe they're marketed as edutainment too... smdh
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Apr 12, 2019 14:41
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I kind of wonder sometimes how often it happens that some middle schooler is writing a history test and the line "and that's when the assassin Auditore murdered the pope" pops up. You know, just in general. I'd bet money that it can't be zero.
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Apr 12, 2019 14:52
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FactsAreUseless posted:Shareware discs are how I played Castle of the Winds, the only one of those games good enough to be memorable. Cool shareware games I remember playing that I'm pretty sure I first found on those bundle CDs (and keeping in mind we were a Mac household when I was a kid):
I think they're also how I was introduced to Moria, and thereby Angband. Those are both completely free though.
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Apr 12, 2019 15:11
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Farecoal posted:drat, can't believe they're marketed as edutainment too... smdh woke up from a blackout to discover I'd downloaded disc images for the entire Apple II output of Sunburst Communications and had thoroughly, brutally edutained myself
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Apr 12, 2019 15:19
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This is a really minor thing but since there's no stamina meter in Sekiro and Wolf can sprint pretty fast it's very easy to force the game to reload corpses in an area and for a brief second you'll see them all jostle around as they're affected by the physics engine again. I don't know why but it always makes me smile when there's an area big enough that I can run back through it and see a bunch of corpses doing little hops down the street as they load.
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Apr 12, 2019 15:50
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food court bailiff posted:This is a really minor thing but since there's no stamina meter in Sekiro and Wolf can sprint pretty fast it's very easy to force the game to reload corpses in an area and for a brief second you'll see them all jostle around as they're affected by the physics engine again. I don't know why but it always makes me smile when there's an area big enough that I can run back through it and see a bunch of corpses doing little hops down the street as they load. I'm playing DS2 and it's the first game where I've really noticed this happening. For the first 20 or so hours of the game I'd freak out when I entered an area I thought I cleared, and would hear things thumping and flopping around. Eventually I figured out it was the bodies spawning back in.
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Apr 12, 2019 16:30
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Cool shareware games I remember playing that I'm pretty sure I first found on those bundle CDs (and keeping in mind we were a Mac household when I was a kid): So much  Ambrosia Software was responsible for far too many of my Mac game favourites - the EV series especially.
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Apr 12, 2019 17:44
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PCGamer demo discs were a vital part of my childhood. There is something to be said about being served a bunch of random poo poo and have no choice but to play them, really allows you to try a lot of things you would never have chosen otherwise. RIP demos. I guess the modern equivalent is those people who download a game on Steam to play it for an hour or two and then just refund it.
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Apr 12, 2019 17:57
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a few game still have demos. kenshi has a pretty good one, for example. it's the whole game, just with a stat ceiling of 20 (out of 100 in the full game)
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Apr 12, 2019 18:05
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Cleretic posted:I thought there was an episode of Commander Keen that was effectively lost because the shareware approach meant nobody had it, but I can't find any evidence of that. The rights to Keen Dreams was purchased by a person who eventually got banned from Steam from renaming their company on Steam to "Gayben's flatulent rear end in a top hat"
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Apr 12, 2019 18:12
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Cool shareware games I remember playing that I'm pretty sure I first found on those bundle CDs (and keeping in mind we were a Mac household when I was a kid): Yeah, Exile: Escape from the Pit was awesome because it literally was half a game. There was a barrier separating the Eastern half from the Western half. This also made it an incredible cocktease, because you could spends dozens of hours playing and then you would just ran out of areas to visit. So youd start fighting two of the dragons or deal with those devils locked away in the Tower of Magi. Its also the game that introduced me to the concept of modding. The PC/NPC sprites were stored as a sheet in bitmap format, so on Windows you could open them with Paint. It started with me fixing a sprite that didnt have the right color of shoulderpads when he got mirrored. Then I edited the pattern on a shield. Eventually I just copy-pasted enemy sprites so I could play with a cool lizard mage in my party.
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Apr 12, 2019 18:14
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Cardiovorax posted:I kind of wonder sometimes how often it happens that some middle schooler is writing a history test and the line "and that's when the assassin Auditore murdered the pope" pops up. You know, just in general. I'd bet money that it can't be zero. He should write "and that's when the assassin Auditore kicked the pope in the balls 18 times."
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Apr 12, 2019 18:40
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Megillah Gorilla posted:Do kids these days even know the joy of going to a computer swap meet, walking up to a table full of floppy disks and CDs in narrow cardboard boxes and just spending 10 minutes flipping through them until something grabbed their eye?
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Apr 12, 2019 18:50
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That reminds me of a glitch I had in AC2. I was up in the rafters in the church in the endgame, watching the pope give his mass and the audience in the pews. I creep up to above the pope, make my dive to kill him...and he vanishes. Just gone. All of the churchgoers in the pews get terrified and try to run away, but they can't find the exit to the church, so they just get in line and do laps in a circle in the open space the pope had been standing in. It was goddamn creepy, and I was half-convinced the pope vanishing was intentional. Then I reloaded, and the second time around it triggered properly. 
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Apr 12, 2019 18:59
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CantDecideOnAName posted:A friend of mine was playing Fallout 4 and somehow had this happen- she had to revert to an earlier save because she couldn't fix it. Farecoal posted:he's just tuckered out after the big battle, let him rest agreed, he deserves a relaxing time
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Apr 13, 2019 00:55
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spongeh posted:The rights to Keen Dreams was purchased by a person who eventually got banned from Steam from renaming their company on Steam to "Gayben's flatulent rear end in a top hat" ...well, okay then. I guess that's an explanation. That kinda makes me wonder how much the rights to random, obscure shareware-era games are now. I'm sure it's still a lot, but it feels like a great weird novelty to own the rights to something like Crystal Caves.
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Apr 13, 2019 01:16
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Crystal Caves will never fall into the public domain. Maybe it could be like that old term "abandonware" which is not a real legal concept, but is supposed to mean "software that nobody cares if it gets pirated"... The rights for everything are owned by someone out there somewhere and they will be until the end of time (unless we destroy the Mickey Mouse juggernaught), and they may have traversed through a weird series of probate & bankruptcy courts and maybe nobody even knows any longer or is paying attention, but if they do and are, the hammer could come down any moment if you're sharing it. It's dumb as heck, something like patent rules would make sense, say 10 years copyright is automatic + an optional 10 year extension (for a registry fee so the big corps dont just autoextend everything). Long tail and all, they're not making money anymore after 1-2 years anyway.
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Apr 13, 2019 01:38
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Tyrian got open sourced, at least. The dude who did the pixel art from it cleaned up all the extracted files for free use in other games (the website also has the assets he made for three other games that never got published). http://www.lostgarden.com/2007/04/free-game-graphics-tyrian-ships-and.html?m=1 Cool guy.
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Apr 13, 2019 01:41
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Oh yeah, actually the folks behind ScummVM have made great strides in getting old point&click adventure games freed up in various ways (either private access to code so they could reimplement the engine, or full blown public domain versions). https://www.scummvm.org
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Apr 13, 2019 01:52
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Krankenstyle posted:Crystal Caves will never fall into the public domain. Maybe it could be like that old term "abandonware" which is not a real legal concept, but is supposed to mean "software that nobody cares if it gets pirated"... Oh, I'm not saying 'I want to have these games fall into the public domain', although I do agree that's a good thing to have happen. I'm saying that I want to legally own the rights to some old, random, esoteric game that nobody fully remembers but might know the title of, just to say that I do.
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Apr 13, 2019 02:03
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Tunicate posted:Tyrian got open sourced, at least. The dude who did the pixel art from it cleaned up all the extracted files for free use in other games (the website also has the assets he made for three other games that never got published). Fruit Ship 9 forever.
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Apr 13, 2019 02:14
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Cleretic posted:Oh, I'm not saying 'I want to have these games fall into the public domain', although I do agree that's a good thing to have happen. I'm saying that I want to legally own the rights to some old, random, esoteric game that nobody fully remembers but might know the title of, just to say that I do. oh yea that'd be kinda neat hah actually, i do own the rights to several hypercard games from the early 90s... alas they never saw a wide release, i think i copied some for my cousin tho.
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Apr 13, 2019 02:33
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The best part about those old shareware games is that there are still 1994-era websites up for some of those devs where they'll still gladly sell you the full version for  .
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Apr 13, 2019 02:55
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man when I got a new computer in 1998 and the unreal tournament demo a little later, I was loving set for months.
Last Chance has a new favorite as of 03:19 on Apr 13, 2019 |
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Apr 13, 2019 03:09
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Cool shareware games I remember playing that I'm pretty sure I first found on those bundle CDs (and keeping in mind we were a Mac household when I was a kid): Same, especially Realmz. I remember looking up how to hex edit the save file in order to give my whole party all the cool stuff, like fire swords.
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Apr 13, 2019 03:16
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HisMajestyBOB posted:Same, especially Realmz. Yyyyyep. I remember downloading hacked characters that had stats through the roof. They'd attack with rare magic gear that did fire/frost/lightning damage on every hit, so it'd be like +4 burn damage! +3 ice damage! +4 lightning damage! +2714 physical damage! I also discovered a dupe trick wholly on my own. This was one of those games where you'd make a bunch of characters, then you'd assemble them into a party and load the party into a scenario. Thus there was a character/party management screen, where you could arrange your party and trade items between characters. I think the way it worked was that characters in scenarios were saved in a different savefile from characters not in a scenario, so you could trade a scenario item to a non-scenario character, then reload the scenario save to restore the item and be able to trade it again. I reported this to the dev, in particular how you could use it to make exponentially huge stacks of gain-stat potions. Their response was not to fix the bug, but to make the gain-stat potions not stack. 
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Apr 13, 2019 03:35
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https://i.imgur.com/gCY39Ol.mp4
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Apr 13, 2019 07:47
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:I reported this to the dev, in particular how you could use it to make exponentially huge stacks of gain-stat potions. Their response was not to fix the bug, but to make the gain-stat potions not stack.
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Apr 13, 2019 09:31
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John Murdoch posted:The best part about those old shareware games is that there are still 1994-era websites up for some of those devs where they'll still gladly sell you the full version for At least Warpath Classic is free. Don't know if them promoting Warpath 21st Century has worked out for them tho.
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Apr 13, 2019 09:52
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Krankenstyle posted:It's dumb as heck, something like patent rules would make sense, say 10 years copyright is automatic + an optional 10 year extension (for a registry fee so the big corps dont just autoextend everything). Long tail and all, they're not making money anymore after 1-2 years anyway. The problem is that the lawmakers are lazy fucktards and refuse to admit that software isn't an artistic intellectual work like a singular-author book series is, and as such shouldn't simply be treated as exactly like it under the same set of blanket rules.
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Apr 13, 2019 12:24
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Cardiovorax posted:Honestly, if I wrote a book and after ten years, some guy came and told me "yeah, you don't own this anymore now, I'm gonna keep publishing it but you won't see a cent," would that honestly be any less hosed up? More convenient for you personally, maybe, but that's not even just how many years were between publishing the first and the last book of the Harry Potter series. Regardless of what the timeline is, the creator of the work is going to feel put out if others start profiting off of it without giving the creator anything. The point isn't to find some magic point at which the creator says "you know what? You're right, feel free to do whatever you like with my baby." The point is to pick a point that's as short as possible without discouraging many creators from creating. Copyright law is supposed to benefit society, by a) making sure that creators get to benefit from their creations (since with no copyright at all, it'd be very hard to justify the time and effort of creating easily-copied works), and then b) getting those works out to society, so that people can enjoy them and incorporate them into their own creations. I'm not saying you specifically are doing this, but anyone arguing that you need a life-of-creator-plus-70-years copyright to encourage people to create probably also believes that billionaires need tax cuts to encourage them to spend their money. The option I've heard of that seems pretty reasonable to me is have exponentially more expensive copyright extensions. By default you get, say, five years, which is enough to get most of the profitability out of most works. If you decide it's worth $10k to get another five years, go for it. The next five years after that is $100k. And so on. In rare cases this will make legit business sense, because the work is the foundation of some large, profitable media empire. When that happens, everyone benefits through the increased copyright fees you pay. But in the majority of the cases, it's not worth it, so all the uncapitalized works fall into the public domain where everyone else can then try making their own spins on the piece.
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Apr 13, 2019 14:54
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:I'm not saying you specifically are doing this, but anyone arguing that you need a life-of-creator-plus-70-years copyright to encourage people to create probably also believes that billionaires need tax cuts to encourage them to spend their money.
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Apr 13, 2019 15:02
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So rich people can basically protect their copyright practically ad infinitum and poor people lose anything in about 5-10 years. Sounds about right. I agree with Cardiovorax's sentiment. If as you say it's about 'the benefit of society', I'd like to see what arguments are put forth that short copyright laws on things like books are of a benefit to society at all. If you write a popular book, what use is making it free-use within a few years? So film studios can wait you out and get the rights for nothing? So companies can commodify and profit off it? So anyone can publish a bunch of cheap cash in sequels? Unlike computer programs, books are basically evergreen purchases and don't really get 'outdated' or 'superseded' in the same way. If you write 3-4 books which barely sell any, then your 5th book gets big and suddenly your back-catalogue is in demand, what then? If you couldn't afford or didn't see the point in extending in the past because they weren't successful, now you miss the entire value of decades of writing, essentially. Maybe I'm not understanding it correctly, but it just seems like your alternative system just fucks poorer people and encourages a system ripe for manipulation where people can just wait out your copyright and then take full advantage. Not to mention it would likely cause a vast rise in simply derivative content as opposed to original works.
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Apr 13, 2019 15:30
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quote:So anyone can publish a bunch of cheap cash in sequels? quote:Unlike computer programs, books are basically evergreen purchases and don't really get 'outdated' or 'superseded' in the same way. The first Might & Magic game is just categorically inferior when compared to basically any given RPG developed in the last 15 years, though, and that's not really a difference you can argue with.
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Apr 13, 2019 15:42
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